How Serial Entrepreneur Darpan Munjal Made Brand Naming A Successful Biz
Brand naming is a critical aspect of businesses that goes beyond mere nomenclature. It is a strategic imperative that can influence a company's trajectory. Squadhelp’s Founder, Darpan Munjal shares insights into the challenges of brand naming and the company's evolution in an exclusive interview with BW Disrupt.
Excerpts
You have always been active in the internet-focused business space in the past. What was the idea behind Squadhelp and the idea of brand naming?
Naming is such a foundational aspect but the challenge with naming is that it's becoming progressively harder year over year to find a good name
For me, I've been a serial entrepreneur. The reason I launched Squadhelp was more of a resource. We launched Squad Help in 2011 and for the first five years, it grew organically with no marketing investment.
2016 is when I realised that this was actually a fairly large market, much bigger than what I was expecting. It attracted major companies like Dell, Nestle, Kelloggs and Hilton.
The platform resonated with businesses seeking creative input, providing tools for idea testing. It has been like a small community help that became a full-fledged business.
How do you envision Squadhelp for 2024? What are your plans for it this year?
We offer crowdsourcing and testing capabilities for name discovery. Recognising the limitation of crowdsourcing, we built a curated marketplace within our platform, featuring around 250,000 names ranging from $2,000 to multimillion dollars. Our goal for 2024 is to further expand this marketplace.
We leverage a lot of AI to help people discover the right names. We use it extensively to assist users in discovering suitable names by establishing connections between words and emotions. New capabilities, including an ultra-premium marketplace, are introduced, offering top-tier brand and domain names ranging from hundreds of thousands to seven-eight figures in USD. This marketplace is dedicated to high-value name collections.
How are you planning to expand in the market in terms of marketing to make people aware of Squadhelp?
We heavily invest in digital marketing, making it the largest expense in our company. Channels like Google, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, LinkedIn, Twitter are crucial, generating nearly 100 million monthly impressions. Our goal is to expand further, exploring OTT channels and newer technologies for measurement. In 2024, we aim to collaborate with startups to distribute our domain catalogue widely, allowing buyers to discover names across various platforms, focusing on multiple acquisition sources. That's really going to be a big focus for us this year as well.
What is the budget allocation that you're looking into marketing?
Around 75 per cent of our total gross margin is reinvested in marketing. This aggressive investment strategy enables us to continuously enhance our platform, adding features and expanding. The remaining funds, along with raised capital, contribute to further investments in technology and product development.
Can you help me go through your funding journey?
In 2023, we partnered with Hilco Digital. They saw an interesting strategic opportunity in squad help because we are really powering the digital asset, domain names being the digital space. So we raised funds as a strategic investment with the company and as a result that has allowed us to really accelerate our growth this year.
We are already seeing the results in the revenue and we've added more people to our team and expanded our marketing and that will continue. We raised $10 million that was part of this as a strategic investment and it was a minority stake that Hilco received as a result.
Do you see expansion in other countries as well to get Squadhelp?
As a global platform, Squadhelp currently serves customers worldwide, with a significant portion of its business coming from international markets. About 30 per cent to 40 per cent of our business right now is international and the remaining comes from the US. The company aims to increase its presence in growing markets like India by expanding marketing efforts, forming partnerships and offering additional branding services beyond naming. There is a lot of startup activity happening in India, so we are definitely going to go deeper into expanding marketing, partnering with companies in India to really promote us as a platform and also offer services that may be complementary to what they offer, but we also plan to add a lot more services that can be helpful to startups.
We are envisioning a comprehensive startup ecosystem, providing various services, from branding to legal assistance, to support businesses in their early stages.
How is branding and the entire creative process impacted by the newer tech or AI particularly?
AI has significantly impacted the technology space and creative processes. We leverage AI pretty much throughout the whole journey a company has associated with us. We utilise AI to complement creativity, aiding in name selection, creating descriptions and aligning brand names with businesses. AI accelerates brainstorming and idea generation without replacing the actual creative process.
We've also built tools that help companies see brand alignment. We have built technology where you can provide an open-ended description of what the business is about and then our AI will help you come up with how this brand name can really work for your business. There's a lot of technology that we built to help people validate the alignment of the brand name with their business.
Overall, I think AI will continue to help accelerate the brainstorming process. It'll help accelerate the idea-generation process.
How is your strategy different for startups and the other well-grown brands in the market?
Early-stage startups, they are starting with a blank sheet of paper. For them, there is an openness to try many different angles.
Established companies, with a structured framework, have more restrictive criteria as the brand name must align with their broader business context.
Well-established companies usually have a more structured process because that brand name needs to live inside a wider framework that they already have established. It needs to fit within the bigger umbrella of what the business, what their company is about. So they're a little bit more restrictive in what names might work.
Talking about your revenue, how has it grown over the years?
We have seen consistent growth in our revenue. Especially with this funding, we are definitely seeing an increase in our revenue overall. For example, this year alone, in the month of January, we did twice as much business as we did last year.
Post Covid, there was high demand for names due to the surge in online businesses, and the recent funding has further accelerated their trajectory, reaching an eight-figure USD run rate.
What are the trends that you are looking forward to for 2024?
One trend is definitely AI, especially in startups focused on AI applications across various industries.
In terms of marketing itself, I feel there will be some newer technologies that would allow companies like us to be a lot more precise in who we target. I think there will be a lot of innovation in the ad tech space as well which will be good for companies like us.
Within naming, there's a trend involving companies seeking more unique and outlier names.
